The Butler’s Forest Whitaker on Aging 60 Years in One Day and Learning to Pour a Proper Cup of Tea

In Lee Daniels’s The Butler, Forest Whitaker plays a White House butler whose career spanned eight administrations. Based on a true story, the character is a firsthand witness to 20th-century American history and the struggles of racial equality in the country. The Hollywood Blog spoke with the Academy Award–winning actor about his intense butlering lessons, playing a wide range of ages in one 20-hour workday, and his experiences with racial profiling. Highlights from our chat:

The Hollywood Blog:This is a great story and interesting with all the history. What was your reaction when you first read the script?

Forest Whitaker: I thought it was an amazing story, and allowed us to not only explore the depths of this family, and this man who got the chance to see history unfolding before his eyes and be a part of its construction. And it was an unbelievable opportunity as an artist to get to play a character of this nature. It is possibly one of the most difficult roles I’ve ever tried to address.

Why was this one particularly difficult?

One, I have to age, from maybe my late 20s to my 90s, and I wanted to do it in an authentic way, not in a pretend way. Also, there are moments when he’s not speaking; you’re just looking at his feelings, so you have to be able to feel my heart and feel my thoughts to understand what I’m thinking. The technical aspects of butlering were important to me in finding the character. I wanted to put in my body all the different moments in history that were going on with me and in my life, and so putting all those things together was complicated. And then, sometimes I would have to do three ages. I think there was one day I might even have had to do four ages in the same day. I would work sometimes 20 hours. They’d do a few hours’ makeup, and I’d be in my 90s. I’d do a few scenes, and because of the budget, they’d have to do everything that was going to be there with these people. Then I’d go take off and put on something else and change my outfit. So just to always know where you are, to understand what moment it is—it was difficult.

You actually learned those things that butlers do, like mixing and garnishing a drink perfectly?

Yeah. Lee [Daniels] wasn’t expecting any of that. I studied with a butler coach. Lee was just joking yesterday. He said he was just filming the [reactions of] the guys—they didn’t even know they were being filmed—when I was making the tea. You know, warming up the cup, getting certain things done a certain way, timing things. Just small things about how you angle a cup, how you reach in to get it up, how you reach over. Hold this at a five-o’clock angle, so then the person just reaches out and it fits right in their finger. If it’s at another angle, it doesn’t; they have to turn it. That’s what I had been taught, how to make a proper tea. Then, not just that, but the philosophical concept of service, of being able to serve to abundance, to bring joy to people, to anticipate what would be needed, to be so connected to individuals that you understand what would be the next movement.

You had said you have had a long relationship with Oprah and had been wanting to work together. Had you two been discussing a project, or it was just luck that something appropriate came along?

We had talked about doing Fences together. We were looking into doing a play. And then this came along. Lee and her had a relationship from Precious, and he had been talking to her about doing it. I came in and auditioned for the part, and she read with me for Lee. Because she was already playing Gloria at that time. And they had been meeting different ones, and actually, during the meeting, he went into the room with her and said, ‘This is the guy. He has to do it.’ And it worked out.

Did working on this movie reawaken you to the struggle for racial equality in this country?

Right, it does exist. The stop-and-frisk issues, in profiling for race or for religion or for sexual choice. People are being killed because of that. This movie deals with the movement that has been started, and it’s continuing to go forward to try to create a country where we all have equal rights, no matter what we think.

I produced Fruitvale, which deals with Oscar Grant and what happened with him, and of course that becomes part of the dialogue at this time, with Trayvon Martin and the sadness that surrounds that loss. I think we’re all in a time where we have to continue to try to move toward that thing. I’ll quote Martin Luther King: he said there was a promissory note that we would have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness made by this country, and I think we’re trying to live up to that note. We’re forcing the issue, and we should all continue to force the issue for us to be able to live a good life.

Have your children seen The Butler yet?

Yeah, they saw it, an earlier cut in Los Angeles, and they liked it. I have four children, and I was really happy that they got to see the film that deals with love, too, in the family, but also that they could get a little understanding of the civil-rights movement in an emotional way. Like seeing those kids getting trained to go into that café and sit there.

It shook me watching that scene.

Oh god, it’s so profound. It’s just so powerful.

You’ve done such a wide array of roles, from Ghost Dog to Last King of Scotland to The Butler. Is there a certain thing you look for?

I look for a character who’s going to keep me growing and learning more. It’s not that I’m choosing not to play the same character; it’s just that I choose to grow and to learn something new, so I’m always exploring the immenseness of the character’s humanity in myself. That’s it.